Jay Jasanoff

Jay Harold Jasanoff ( or ) is an American linguist and Indo-Europeanist, best known for his h2e-conjugation theory of the Proto-Indo-European Verbal system.

He teaches Indo-European linguistics and historical linguistics at Harvard University.

Jasanoff received both his bachelor's degree (in 1963) and his Ph.D. (in 1968) from Harvard.

After working for one year as an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley, he returned to Harvard to teach as an assistant professor and, later, associate professor from 1970 to 1978.

He then moved to Ithaca, New York, to teach at Cornell University, where he was promoted to full professor in linguistics.

He taught at Cornell for twenty years, including a number of years as the department chair.

Jasanoff’s research since the 1970s has focused on Indo-European Verbal morphology, especially the reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European middle endings (“proto-middle”).

In addition to the Indo-European verb, he has treated such issues as the origin of the Balto-Slavic pitch accent, Germanic and Celtic nominal morphology, and the internal reconstruction of the earliest stages of the Proto-Indo-European language.

Since 1998 he has been the Diebold Professor of Indo-European Linguistics and Philology at Harvard, and was the department chair from 1999 to 2008.

In his research, he has examined, in addition to the Indo-European verb, such issues as the origin of the Balto-Slavic pitch accent and the internal reconstruction of the earliest stages of the Proto-Indo-European language.

He has emphasized the importance of the Hittite and Tocharian evidence for Proto-Indo-European reconstruction, as these languages were not available to 19th century Indo-Europeanist reconstruction.

His research has contributed to integrating Hittite and Tocharian Verbal morphology into the reconstruction of the Indo-European Verbal system, though he emphasizes that “the post-h2e-conjugation model of the PIE verb is (…) in many respects extremely conservative” and “The novelty of the ‘new’ system is entirely at the formal level.”   His novel reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European middle in the context of the *h2e-conjugation theory as proposed in Hittite and the Indo-European verb and subsequent articles has been adopted by several textbooks and has been generally well-received.

Jasanoff has argued that certain ablaut properties and inflectional endings found in the Hittite and Tocharian Verbal systems require the revision of the traditionally reconstructed middle endings and their relationship with the endings of the PIE perfect and the thematic conjugation.

Specifically, he proposes that the PIE inflectional endings for the primary (nonpast) active and middle should be reconstructed as follows:

While the reconstruction of the active endings continues the “Brugmannian” model, the middle endings differ from older reconstructions in 1) the reconstruction of the primary middle hic-et-nunc marker as *-r (rather than *-i), 2) the reconstruction of originally “dentalless” third singular and plural forms *-o(-r) and *-ro(r), which were remodeled as *-to(r) and *-nto(r) already at the PIE stage in analogy with the third person active forms, but were preserved as designated passive or “stative” endings in Indo-Iranian (Ved. 3sg. "stative" -e < *-o-i), Anatolian (Hitt. 3sg. -a(ri) < *-o(ri)) and Old Irish (3sg. pass. -ar < *-or), among others.

Concerning ablaut, Hittite and the Indo-European verb proposes a novel type of present with o/e-ablaut (later o/ø-ablaut of the root, the so-called “mólh2-E-Type” (*melh2 ‘to grind’), named after the *h2e-conjugation 3sg. present *mólh2-e reflected in the Hittite 3sg. present malli ‘grinds’, Lith. malù 'grind' and Gothic malan ‘to grind’ according to Jasanoff. This type has been added to the Addenda of the LIV. Jasanoff has also argued for proto-middle *h2e-conjugation aorists with o/e-ablaut (later o/ø-ablaut) of the root, which gave rise to the Indo-Iranian passive aorist and the Tocharian subjunctive V, among others.

The Proto-Indo-European sigmatic aorist is traditionally reconstructed with Narten-ablaut of the root (ē/e), an invariant stem-forming suffix *-s-, and the athematic secondary endings.

However, the corresponding active preterit categories in Hittite and Tocharian show an *-s- only in the third person singular, as well as evidence of an unexpected o-grade of the root throughout the paradigm.

Jasanoff argues that this situation reflects an archaism and that the classical s-aorist emerged from an older *h2e-conjugation aorist with o-grade of the root, whose 3sg.

active form was replaced by an intrusive Narten-imperfect form to disambiguate it from the newly emerging *h2e-conjugation middle aorists of the same shape.

The proposed original paradigm thus looked as follows:

After Anatolian and Tocharian split off, the third singular active form became the starting point for the development of the “classical” s-aorist found in Indo-Iranian, Greek, Latin, etc. This reconstruction is elaborated and defended in Jasanoff (2019).

Jasanoff was born in New York City to Milton and Edith Jasanoff, both of Eastern European Jewish descent.

He has a younger sister, Joan Reyna.

His wife, Sheila Jasanoff, is a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School.

His son, Alan Jasanoff, is a neuroscientist at MIT, and his daughter, Maya Jasanoff, is a professor in the Department of History at Harvard.